Two astronauts viewed nothing but chalky lunar landscape and blackest night.
“Look. Here are footprints from the Apollo landings, nearly forty years ago.”
“Yeah. Undisturbed all this time. No wind or weather to erase them.” The astronaut with Myers stitched on his moon suit bent clumsily down for a closer look. “These might be Armstrong’s.”
The other astronaut, Golding, replied, “No, probably Harrison Schmitt considering our location. He was the last man to walk on the moon.”
Myers straightened up. “Until us.” He hopped a big hop in the moon’s low gravity. “That’s fun. Try it.”
Golding was examining something on the surface. “Look at these prints.”
Myers bounced lightly over. “Why? I already looked at them.”
“Not these. Look.” Golding pointed at odd-looking footprints. There were thin, three-toe prints with ball shapes at the end of the toes.
Myers studied them. “Probably left by some equipment. A camera tripod or weather station.”
“I don’t think so. They go forward, like tracks. Tripods don’t walk.”
“Maybe it was moon men, out for a stroll,” Myers kidded.
“What was that?” Golding turned around as fast as he could in his bulky moon suit.
“What was what?”
“I thought I saw something move behind us. A shape of some kind.”
Myers laughed in his helmet. “You’re getting jumpy. I was just joking about moon men. There’s no life on the moon; never was, never will be. Too dead; no water, no atmosphere, no nothing.”
“Maybe an alien from somewhere else landed here like us. Or crashed here. Like at Roswell,” Golding reasoned.
“Roswell was a weather balloon. Aliens don’t exist. You’ve been watching too many scifi movies.”
“There! Again,” Golding broke in. “Did you see that? Something moved behind that drift over there.”
“I didn’t see anything.” Myers shrugged in his suit. “Probably just a shadow.” He looked at dials on his suit’s arm. “It’s getting late. Let’s stake the radio beacon and get back to the ship.”
The two astronauts worked in silence for several moments until Golding dropped a tool. Due to the moon’s low gravity it bounced away, landing behind a small cluster of rocks. Golding went to retrieve it. He called out to Myers. “Hey, come take a look at this.”
Myers walked over. It was one of the little lunar exploratory robot carts that roll around gathering data, left from some earlier mission. It had been taken completely apart. Wires, energy cells and tiny mechanic parts lay spread out all over.
“I suppose a shadow did that,” Golding muttered.
“Probably a previous astronaut disassembled it,” Myers replied. “Looking for parts,” he joked.
“Maybe the crashed alien is looking for parts to repair his damaged space ship!” Golding seized on Myers’ suggestion. Then Golding exclaimed, “Did you see that? Something definitely crossed behind us. Back on the path we took here, back towards the . . .” Suddenly Golding swore and starting running as best he could towards their lunar module, the landing LM.
“What are you doing?” Myers yelled into his helmet microphone, scrambling after Golding.
“The alien, the little green man, he climbed up the LM’s ladder!”
“Oh for crying out loud, you’ve lost it completely, a little green-”
Myers stopped in mid-sentence as bright flames erupted from the LM’s rockets, and it slowly climbed into the dark sky and was soon out of sight.
Both astronauts watched, dumbfounded, as it disappeared. Finally, Golding remarked, “That alien just hot-wired our LM. We’ve been modulejacked!”
Rod Drake used to think he was a fictional character in a story, but discovered he was the author instead. This is not one of those times. Check out Rod’s other stories published in Fictional Musings, Flash Flooding, Flash Forward, MicroHorror, Six Sentences and AcmeShorts.
Highly amusing, Rod!